Structural and Physiological Properties of Cholinesterases
At the cholinergic synapse, the enzyme acetylcholinesterase terminates the electrophysiological response to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (ACh) by degrading it very rapidly. (For a review, see Silver, A., The Biology of Cholinesterases. North-Holland Pub. Co., Amsterdam (1974)). Mammalian cholinesterases (ChEs) exhibit extensive polymorphism at several levels. They can be distinguished by substrate specificity into acetylcholinesterase (acetylcholine hydrolase, EC 3.1.1.7, AChE) and butylcholinesterase or pseudocholinesterase (acylcholine acylhydrolase, EC 3.1.1.8, .psi.ChE). These cholinesterases differ in their susceptibility to various inhibitors. Both are composed of subunits of about 600 amino acid residues each and are glycosylated (10-20%).
ChEs occur in multiple molecular forms, which exhibit different sedimentation coefficients on sucrose gradients, display different hydrodynamic interactions with non-ionic detergents and are composed of different numbers of subunits. (For a comprehensive review see Massoulie, J., and Bon, S., Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 5:57-106 (1982)) . There are secreted, cytoplasmic, and membrane-associated pools of ChEs in the mammalian nervous tissue, but all forms of ChEs possess similar catalytic properties, suggesting that they share common acetylcholine binding sites (Chubb, I. W., In: Cholinesterases--Fundamental and Applied Aspects. M. Brzin, E. A. Barnard, and D. Sket, Eds., pp. 345-359, (1984)). Various ChEs may also contain distinct polypeptide regions, responsible for the subcellular segregation of various AChE forms, for their different amphipathic properties and for their different modes of assembly into multisubunit protein molecules. This is supported by the reports of antibodies which display homologies (Fambrough et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 79:1078-1082 (1982)), as well as differences (Doctor et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 80:5767-5771 (1983)) between different forms of AChE from various organisms.